Now I get it - stick thin means women will never have the energy to succeed

I was backstage after a Dior show in Paris and I went to hug Gisele Bundchen, the Brazilian bombshell and model of the moment, hailed, because of her brown, spherical breasts, as ‘The Body’. As I crunched her tiny form in my arms, it was like hugging a broken umbrella.

When I got back to London, I decided that was it. No more lies about how ‘curves are back’ when the only curves on this young woman were the ones she may or may not have had surgically implanted.

I publicly called Gisele a ‘bag of bones’ (at the Government’s ill-starred ‘body summit’ to try to force the fashion industry to stop pressurising teenagers into perfection) and was quickly ousted from my job as editor of Marie Claire magazine.

The one thing you cannot do on a glossy is upset the advertisers, most of whom were using Gisele as their ‘face’ at the time.

Lo and behold, almost a decade later, another young woman, with the silhouette of a deck chair, has been labelled ‘skin and bones’, this time by doctors observing a Miss Universe contest in Australia. Finalist Stephanie Naumoska, aged 19, is 5ft11in, weighs 7st8lb and claims to eat ‘six to eight healthy meals a day’. Of course she does.

Bag of bones: Gisele Bundchen's rise to fame was not a sign curves were back en vogue

Scratch the tanned, exfoliated surface of any remotely famous woman (young or not-so-young) these days and she will assure you she eats like a horse (actually, horses don’t eat that much, other than very low-calorie grass) and vegges out on her sofa rather than exercises.

Not that I care whether a Hollywood star vomits down her expensive Lycra exercise gear in order to look like a 16-year-old.

I don’t care, either, whether Gisele develops brittle bone disease
in later life. But I do care that these stupid women are still (still!)
held up as something to aspire to by the rest of us.

Ah, I hear
you murmuring, but aren’t we in the midst of an obesity epidemic? Isn’t
it a good thing to hold up these super-svelte women to back up the
Government’s new initiative with McDonald’s and Mars to get children
eating healthily?

I would counter that when we had ‘fat’ movie
stars, such as Monroe, Lollobrigida, Taylor, Loren and Ekberg, we
didn’t have obese children.

If Gordon Brown had his way, all these
women, certainly ‘obese’ by today’s Government guidelines, would have
had their doors battered down by police before being shipped off
forcibly to fat camp.

What has happened in the 50 years since those movie stars were held
up as beauties is that we have been trained to see food as either an
enemy or as a treat. Bodies are battlegrounds.

I have a friend who was anorexic in her 20s, and now, in her 30s, weighs 16 stone. She thinks about food every waking second of every single day.

Yes, it is worrying that new statistics show hospital admissions for teenagers with anorexia have risen by 80 per cent in the past ten years, but I am more concerned by the fact women like my friend have had their lives ruined by trying to pummel their bodies into a shape that is unnatural for them.

Once famous for her shapely figure, Claudia Schiffer is now described as 'taut'

I have been puzzling for years about why women are being bombarded with images of very thin perfection and I suppose part of it is that designers find it easier to dress someone with the shape of an adolescent boy. Part of it, too, is that the slimming industry is too lucrative to be put out of business.

But I also believe that making us think about what we ate today and what we will eat tomorrow is a great way of ensuring women don’t have the energy to succeed. We don’t need ‘gender pay audits’ – to be announced tomorrow in the Equalities Bill – to find out why on earth women are paid less than men.

This is how Claudia Schiffer, the most super of the supers, is described in Vogue: ‘She is the thinnest she has ever been. Those once soft, enviable curves have transformed into taut, strong angles. In short, her body is a product of out-and-out discipline.’

Schiffer admits proudly: ‘The combination of Pilates three days a week with yoga is incredible.’